# The wristband

It is three seventeen. Karim wakes, not for the pain, the pain would come later if he did not move; for the pressure that the right side exerts between the fifth and sixth ribs, a pressure the finger goes to seek in the exact point not for relief but for verification, to know that the body is still in the point where Karim left it the evening before, with the same scar of the same length, twenty-one centimetres.

The house sleeps. The youngest son breathes with his mouth open in the children's room with the door ajar, the two daughters sleep head against head; Zahra sleeps on her back with her left arm falling off the mattress.

Karim rises in three times: he sits, sets his feet on the floor, stands by pushing with his knees; the third time is the one in which the side burns most, the one in which the right spring of the bed creaks if he rises in a hurry, and for nineteen months Karim has not risen in a hurry. The scar under his shirt was made on 23 August 2024, the hospital is called Al-Sadr. At the port he asked for a change of duties in September because unloading he could no longer do; now he works in the shipping warehouse, the heavy load he passes to Nassir the colleague of twenty on his right. Nassir has never asked him why.

Karim crosses the corridor, eleven steps, the walls covered in a yellow paint that peels in three spots in the same three spots for five years because redoing it costs what half a month of medicine for the little girl costs. He stops in front of the drawer of Zahra's bedside table. He opens the drawer. Inside is a transparent plastic sleeve and inside the sleeve a paper wristband with an adhesive band that says Al-Sadr Hospital, Karim Hussein Al-Bakri, 36 years, male, operation 0818-24; Karim has never thrown it away, never worn it after discharge, never put it in his own drawer but in Zahra's, a choice made on the evening of the twenty-seventh of August without thinking, with the sleeve in his pocket and the body that wanted only to lie down. The wristband has been in the sleeve for nineteen months.

On 14 August the doctor at the Jumhuri had said, with that courtesy that doctors of public hospitals keep for bad news, that the child was in a transverse position, that the caesarean was obligatory within ten days, that the waiting list at the Jumhuri was three weeks; at the first private clinic named, Hayat, he had added the price: one thousand eight hundred dollars, a price that in the doctor's mouth was a figure and in Karim's head had become at once the distance between three hundred and forty dollars in the tin and all the rest. The landlord was still waiting for the five hundred from April. The brother in Nassiriyah on the phone had said he had nothing. Zahra's parents had helped the year before and had said: next time we cannot. The eighteen hundred had to come from somewhere else, from a place no one at the port named loudly, when the motor of the forklift covered the words, when someone said that Al-Hussain worked with those in need of money. Al-Hussain was not a stranger: he had been at the warehouse three years before, then had found other work. Karim had waited two days. Then he had called. Al-Hussain had answered on the third ring.

The left kidney was worth two thousand five hundred dollars, a figure that fit inside the one thousand eight hundred of the Hayat plus the five hundred of the rent plus the rest. The signing had been on the evening of the eighteenth in via Al-Mutanabbi, two hundred dollars in advance, the rest after the operation. Karim had told her: "I found the money with a colleague, Hassan, the one from warehouse six." Zahra had said: "good." She had seen the scar the first day that Karim came back home; she had not asked. Karim had not told. The agreement between them has had no words: it has had silence as its form.

Karim stands before the open drawer. It is three twenty-two. He opens the sleeve, takes out the wristband, slips it on his right wrist. The wrist is thinner than nineteen months ago; the wristband slides toward the elbow. Karim brings it back to the wrist, tightens the adhesive band that no longer holds. He presses it between two fingers. Now it holds.

He returns to the bed, sits on the edge with the wristband on the right wrist and the right hand resting on the side, on the scar. Zahra turns, opens her eyes, says nothing. She looks at Karim's wrist, sees the wristband; then she looks at Karim's face. Karim does not look at her. He looks at the window that opens on the inner courtyard of the building where on the floor above a light has come on: someone else is not sleeping in Basra at three twenty-four. After a minute Zahra says: "today I am going to see my sister."

Karim says: "good."

Zahra: "I am taking the children."

Karim: "good."

Zahra: "the little one still has a cough. I am taking him to the doctor first."

Karim: "good."

Zahra goes back to bed, lies on her back with her left arm inside the mattress now. Karim remains on the edge. The wristband on the wrist.

At four thirty-one the mosque calls; the muezzin of the quarter is old and the voice breaks on the last note. Karim rises, goes to the bathroom, washes his hands, his face, his feet. The paper wristband gets wet on the wrist, the adhesive band comes off; the wristband falls into the basin and floats for a second on the water that has not yet gone down the drain. Karim picks it up. The name is still legible, the date still, the operation number still. He returns to the room, opens the drawer of Zahra's bedside table, takes the sleeve, puts the wristband back in, closes the sleeve, puts the sleeve back in the drawer, closes the drawer.

The right side burns. Karim presses with his finger. It is not relief. It is verification.

He leaves the house at five. Work is waiting for him at via Al-Ashraf 43; the day has twelve hours and the side will warm with movement. Tonight Karim will take the wristband from the sleeve, will put it back on the wrist, will wet it in the bathroom, will put it back in the sleeve. The drawer is Zahra's. Karim believes that Zahra does not know.